Saturday, December 17, 2011

The Gambia's Yahya Jammeh
is a man who obviously has never heard of term limits.After winning re-election as president in a
vote widely condemned by regional authorities as unfair, Jammeh said that he
was ready to rule for “one billion years”, if God wills it, of course.

Jammeh has long been accused of political oppression since
taking over as leader of this tiny West African state following a coup in
1994.On a personal note, I happen to
know someone who had to flee The Gambia after his organization ran afoul of the
Jammeh government, so the claims of oppression are real.The media watchdog group Reporters Without
Borders notes that journalists who question the government are often arrested,
while in their piece, the BBC discusses the case of Deyda
Hydara, editor of a private newspaper in The Gambia who was murdered in 2004, a
murder blamed on Jammeh's security forces and still officially unsolved.

ECOWAS, theEconomic Community of West African States, refused to send
observers to monitor the presidential election because they said the opposition
had been effectively silenced, making the vote inherently unfair.For his part, Jammeh says that his critics
can “go to hell”, and that he does not fear an Arab Spring-style uprising in
his country.

It is hard to imagine what the
world would be like at the end of Jammeh's billion-year rule, but thanks to our friends at NASA, we at least have an idea of what things might be like at the
250 million-year mark.According to
computer projections, continental drift will carry West Africa to the
northwest, placing The Gambia on a latitude roughly equal to present-day Alaska
and pressing it up against northern Canada.Jammeh might want to start planning for the changes in location and environmental
conditions now.

Mission Statement

Why A World View? Because I was frustrated by the lack of international news coverage in the American press. Sadly, foreign events usually only make the news when there’s a war or natural disaster someplace. But the world is more interconnected than ever, what happens on the other side of the globe can have a direct affect on your life. So I started this site to cover some of these stories missed by the mainstream media, and to provide analysis and context to others. And my goal is to do it in a way that you don’t feel like you need a PhD degree to understand what’s going on.